Two meet each other after 46 years apart

Diane LaHaie didn't get to hold or even see the baby girl she had on Sept. 24, 1967 before the baby was taken away for a closed adoption. For 46 years, all LaHaie had was one picture of the baby, and the hope that someday she would find her. On Oct. 19, 2013, the years of looking and hoping paid off when LaHaie finally found her daughter Bobbie Dillon on Facebook. LaHaie got pregnant with Dillon when she was 17-years-old and living in California. “I was living at that time with my sister, who had seven children at the time. You can't keep a child when you are only 17, living in a house with nine children by then, and me, which was ten,” said LaHaie. LaHaie was sent to an unwed mothers home for two months, which she said didn't last. “It was 'take me home, or I'm going to leave.' It was a terrible place,” she explained. LaHaie moved back home until she was ready to give birth to Dillon. “I stayed at home until I had her at the hospital, and that was a nightmare too because it was like two days worth of being punished, because back then it was like that, a good Catholic girl not married and pregnant,” said LaHaie. LaHaie gave birth, and Dillon was taken away immediately without a chance for LaHaie to see or touch her. “Six weeks later, I signed the papers, and got the only picture I had of her for 46 years. Giving her up was the hardest thing I ever did,” said LaHaie. “When I got pregnant with her, it was the '60s, the Vietnam War was going on, and her dad had to go to Arizona to report for the draft and just never came back. I did write to him, and he wrote to me, but that didn't change things.” LaHaie got married shortly after having Dillon and had two children with an an abusive husband who she left after four years. She eventually moved to Cheboygan in 1972. Her sister and her husband at the time owned Deed's Bar in Cheboygan and sent her money to move, and LaHaie met her husband Tom LaHaie not long after. The two have been married since and have one son together. LaHaie spent time off and on in the '70s and '80s writing letters to several agencies trying to find Dillon. “You had to fill out all these forms and send them in and you'd get letters back, but nothing ever came of it because it was a closed adoption. Closed adoptions were unheard of back then, especially in the Catholic church,” explained LaHaie. Patrick LaHaie, Diane's son who lives in Florida, had an investigator look for Dillon in 2005. The investigator called Patrick one day and told him she had found Dillon's address. “She had the address right in front of her. She said she usually charged $8,000, but could drop it down to $5,000. I had the money at the time, but I told her I would think about it. … I went back to talk to my wife about it, and we decided, we know about her, (Dillon) but she doesn't know about us. Knowing that there a lot of horror stories out there, maybe if we show up at her house, she wouldn't want to see us. That's a pretty heavy deal. So I made the decision that if it's meant to be, then it's going to be through her or some other means. … It was hard,” said Patrick. LaHaie spent years registering with the agencies and searching for Dillon, and then one day she saw a photo posted of a woman holding a sign that said she was looking for her mother and that gave her the idea to try it for herself. In what she called a “last-ditch effort,” she posted the picture of Dillon that she had kept all the years along with the information where and when she was born. Dillon had also been looking for LaHaie, and had signed up at adoption.com in 2005, but didn't put a picture on the site. “You could just put a description, where I was born and when. I only had a description of my mom, height, weight, ethnicity and things like that,” said Dillion. “I had been looking on and off, but I swore I would never really look while my adopted mother was still alive.” LaHaie had given up when Angela Chastain, of Cheboygan, sent her a link to Dillon's profile on adoption.com. “I followed the link to the profile and saw the description, and the description of myself. I was 'that could be her. I think it is!' By that time I'm manic. I posted it to her on adoption.com ,but I didn't know if she had been back since 2005,” said LaHaie. LaHaie's friend, Linda Baller, had also seen the post and started looking on Facebook along with LaHaie. Finally, they found Dillon. “I looked at her site, and there were pictures of her when she was young that looked exactly like me,” said LaHaie. “I messaged her, but when you are not friends on there, the messages go to a different folder. But I saw that for $1 you could have the message sent to her, so I did that. By then I was done. I could't look anymore. So I turned off the computer and went to bed.” The next morning, Dillon said: “It was a Monday morning, Oct. 19, and I'm off on Mondays, so I was waking up and looking on Facebook. … I had been talking to a lady on Facebook who does adoption searching, and that morning I was talking to her and she told me she had my birth mother's name for a week, but I hadn't gotten back to her. So she sent me the name, and not five minutes later the message from my mom came up. And it had the picture of me as a baby, and I have almost an identical one.” Dillon, who lives in California, and LaHaie spent hours talking on the phone, and begin to see the similarities between each other. “It's very strange. ...We have a lot of weird stuff that is a lot the same. Probably more than I had with my adopted mom,” said Dillon. Then on Monday, Jan. 13, the two finally saw each other in person when LaHaie met Dillon at the gate when her plane arrived. “A friend of mine has a cousin in Detroit that got me a gate pass, and that just doesn't happen,” said LaHaie. After a brief hang up with security, LaHaie was finally allowed to get to the gate and meet her daughter for the first time face-to-face. Unknown to LaHaie, Dillon and LaHaie's son, Patrick, who LaHaie hadn't seen for 10 years, had been talking as well and had set up a reunion of the entire family. “We met Tom (LaHaie's husband) and my two sons and were taking pictures and everything, and I see this person kind of peeking out around the corner, and I thought it was just a person trying not to get in the pictures. Then Patrick walked out. … In that airport, at that time, was the first time all of my children have been together, ever, in 46 years,” said LaHaie, choking up a little. The family stopped to eat later, and Tom took a picture of LaHaie and her children's first family meal together. LaHaie posted the photograph on Facebook, and in between the time the family left to come back to Cheboygan, Tom's brother and sister-in-law, Gary and Julie LaHaie, had printed the photograph, framed it, and had it waiting for them hanging on the door at their home in Cheboygan. The reunited mother and daughter have spent the past week seeing some of the local sites, including the Mackinac Bridge, and getting to know each other. A party will be held Saturday, Jan. 18 for friends and family before Dillon heads back to California the next day. Diane and Tom plan to make a trip to visit Dillon's home in California soon. “There are no words enough to tell you what this is like for me. To finally have my daughter, and even though she is a long ways away, it is not going to impede what's going to happen in our lives,” said LaHaie.